suffered an appendicitis. To ease the boredom of his recuperation, a religious brother who taught at Mícheál's school gave him a guitar. By the age of sixteen, Mícheál began devoting his musical energies to the guitar. Throughout his early years, he and his sisters Tríona and Maighréad continued to sing the Irish songs together in close harmony. With their father's advice to "listen across one another" to pick up subtle shifts in harmony, the siblings developed a seamless texture to their singing. Tríona would later recall, "We could just look at each other in the midst of a song, and that look would communicate so much. When you've close family ties, it's instinctive." Skara Brae In the late 1960s, Mícheál and his sister Tríona began attending University College Dublin, where they met up with singer-guitarist Dáithi Sproule (future member of Altan) from Derry. They began performing together around Dublin, producing "beautiful, adventurous" arrangements of Irish Gaelic songs. In the summer of 1970, Mícheál and Dáithi performed as the house band at Teach Hiudaí Beag in Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore), Donegal. Later that year, Mícheál, Tríona, Maighread, and Dáithi formed the group Skara Brae, a name suggested by Mícheál in reference to Skara Brae, an archaeological site in the Orkney Islands in Scotland consisting of a bleak stone village built in the second millennium BC. In 1971, Skara Brae released an eponymous album of "beautifully performed Gaelic songs" on Gael Linn Records. It was notable as the first recording to include vocal harmonisation in Irish language songs. In 2004, Ó Domhnaill described the influences on the group in an interview with the RTÉ radio program Rattlebag: Skara Brae's version of "Tá mé 'mo shuí" shows the unique influence of Rann na Feirste. The song is performed differently in other parishes of the same area. The four voices are skilfully supported by Triona's harpsichord, and the unique guitar work of Mícheál and Dáithi. Mícheál in fact was one of the first guitar players, along with Dáithí, in Irish traditional music to employ DADGAD tuning. His guitar style had a dramatic impact on guitarists who followed in the genre. Both Mícheál and Dáithí were influenced in their early years by John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. In 1973, while playing the club circuit in Ireland and still a student at University College Dublin, Ó Domhnaill met Mick Hanly, a Limerick-born singer, guitarist, and dulcimer player,